Stephen Scott could not contain his fearful question any longer. Almost stuttering in his premonition of the answer, he said, “You’ve been talking about these roaches killing Sharky, and the rabbit, and rats . . .” He stopped, then could no longer hold the words in. “Are you saying these cockroaches can kill people?”

Hubbard answered, “Yes,” bluntly, without hesitation or concealment.

Elias Johnson slapped the table. “No! That’s impossible! Just roaches?”

Wanda Lindstrom backed up Peter Hubbard. “I’m afraid Dr. Hubbard is right. Especially if the insects attack in swarms, as we have to suspect.”

“My God!” Scott whispered to himself.

“What’d you say, Stephen?” Elias Johnson asked roughly out of his own mounting trepidation. “What’d you say? Speak up, dammit!”

“Nothing!” Scott sputtered. He simply could not permit his forebodings to assume the reality that words would impart to them. The possibility was too inhuman to contemplate. But in his mind’s eye he was again in the empty Tinton house the night before, again flashing his light in the woods looking for the Tintons and for Hilda Cannon—and now totally unable to keep his concern from leaping to the question of the missing Cannon girls as well.

He was glad when a question from Craig diverted attention away from him. “How would Sharky’s ear get up in a tree?”

“Roaches climb easily,” Hubbard told him. “They might have been disturbed before they finished . . .”

“Lay anchor here just a minute!” Elias Johnson called out. “I just barely got it through my head that these damn things could be like piranha. Okay. Now you’re telling us they—they lug away parts of what they kill?” His eyes were hot with the challenge of the impossible.

It was Wanda Lindstrom who gave him the gristly answer, in a tone so quiet it could barely be heard through the kitchen. “It’s not any different from the way jungle animals drag prey back to their caves, for their young, or to feed on later. Conceivably, these insects have a central nest . . .”

Now Elias Johnson sputtered, “Cockroaches could drag a dog?”

The woman kept her voice clinical. “Not in one piece,” she said steadily to the disbelieving faces around the kitchen.

“Oh, come on!” Amos Tarbell protested. “Ben, Russ and I saw the damn things just an hour ago. There were zillions of them, all right, and they did try to get at us, but you’re saying they could drag us somewhere . . . ?”

The woman repeated, understanding their resistance, “I said, not in one piece.” She sat down. The facade of the scientist was cracking. Despite her self-­control, the image of a body being cut apart by mutant roaches sickened her, too.